1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to navigation and location systems and more particularly to short-range wireless ultra-wideband (UWB) radio triangulation systems.
2. Description of Related Art
The ancient art of land surveying involves the determination of an unknown position from angular and distance measurements taken from one or more reference positions. The global positioning system (GPS) operated by the United States Department of Defense depends on measuring the time-of-flight of microwave radio signals from three or more orbiting satellite transmitters by a navigation receiver that computes the position of the user. The locating of mobile units in a region by radio triangulation is well-known, for example one artisan has suggested locating police units for a city dispatcher. Anderson, et al., describe in U.S. Pat. No. 3,680,121, issued Jul. 25, 1972, a locator system for a vehicle having an unknown location that transmits a short modulated radio frequency pulse. Receivers in the area compare the received signal with a standard time reference signal. The phase difference with the reference time is used to determine the arrival time differences. A time reference accurate to one or two microseconds is required to be provided to four receivers in a geographic area. A local television broadcast signal is said to be an adequate source of such a timing reference.
At their very basic level, radar systems transmit radio frequency pulses and measure the time that reflections of the transmitted signal take to be reflected back. The flight time is a measure of the distance from the radar unit to the reflecting objects. Highly directional antennas allow such transmissions and signal reflections back to be narrowly focused, so that the direction to such reflective objects can also be gauged.
The present inventor, Thomas E. McEwan, describes in his U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/359,151, filed Dec. 19, 1994and incorporated herein, a short range, ultra-wideband radar with a high resolution swept range gate. A transmit timing pulse is connected to cause a radar transmitter to output a pulse. A receive timing pulse is connected to gate through a return sample from a differential receiver that eliminates spurious noises from its close proximity to the transmitter. The gated receiver signal indicates whether a reflection was detected within a narrow time window. The time window is slewed back and forth by a sweep generator to search for the detectable reflections. The exact delay of the receive timing pulse from the transmit timing pulse that produces a detectable reflection is a measure of the distance to the reflecting object, for example, four inches to as far as twenty feet.
The present inventor, Thomas E. McEwan, also describes in his U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/359,151, filed Dec. 19, 1994, and incorporated herein, a short range, ultra-wideband radar with a high resolution swept range gate. A single timing generator is used to output both a transmit-timing pulse that triggers a radar transmitter to output a pulse and a receive-timing pulse that gates through a return sample from a differential radar receiver in close proximity to the transmitter. Pulse-by-pulse, the receive-timing pulse is varied in phase with the transmit-timing pulse in a sweep spanning milliseconds to gather thousands of pieces of time-phase information about the time it takes the radar pulse to travel out and return back from a radio-reflective object.
The parent application Ser. No. 08/300,909, filed Sep. 6, 1994, describes a system in which the transmitter is tethered by a wire. In some instances such a tethering may be objectionable. Therefore, a wireless implementation would have important advantages in particular applications.